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From Our Own Correspondent
Linguistic confusion and mass killers
00:28:10
Correspondents stories from Berlin, Paris, Ethiopia, the US and the South Atlantic.
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A
Thank you for downloading from our own correspondent. This edition was broadcast on Thursday 27th October 2016. It's introduced by Kate Ady. Hello. Today, terrorists would often like to alter our lives, change our habits. So how does a correspondent react when returning to Paris where he reported the shocking attack nearly a year ago In Ethiopia's capital? Under a state of emergency, there's confusion about what's really happening. So an obvious time to party. Then, like there's no tomorrow, we take a journey from Harvard to Harlem through divided America, and we meet a man who's become one of the world's most prolific killers. But he's only trying to repair damage done by humans. Theresa May has now got her first European Council summit meeting under her belt and she used the opportunity to repeat her assertion that there's no turning back on Brexit. Many reports of her first summit concentrated on the less than enthusiastic welcome she appeared to receive from the other leaders. Her after dinner speech at one in the morning lasted just five minutes and apparently was greeted with silence. Even Germany, which is traditionally the UK's most powerful ally in the EU, appears to be losing patience with London. And Damian McGuinness in Berlin believes there's a growing communication problem between the British and German governments. He concludes that the at the heart of the matter, it might be a different understanding of some very simple words.
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There's one thing about the German language that if you're British, you never really quite get used to. It's how to say yes and how to say no. An English friend of mine, Jessica, once told me a story which sums up the problem. When she was at school in London, she was about to go on an exchange to stay with her family in Germany, and the teacher sat them all down for a talk. Now, girls, the teacher explained, when someone offers you something to eat and you want it, you say yes, not no. These well brought up young ladies would usually say, oh, no, couldn't possibly to that plate of biscuits first time round, and wait to be persuaded before giving in with a genteel oh, go on then. In Germany, this, the teacher went on patiently, no actually means no. You won't be offered that biscuit again. Crazy, Jessica remembers thinking, obviously. The school had had experience of pupils coming back famished. In British English, of course, no can mean yes. Yes can mean no and maybe, possibly and would love to, but can mean either a group of British people trying to decide where to go for dinner will say things like I'm easy or I don't mind even Though everyone quite obviously does mind. This is all quite straightforward to Brits and the subtext is clear. But seen from the outside in Germany, it's baffling. And I suspect it's a cultural difference, which partly accounts for the communication problems we're seeing right now over Brexit. Last year, David Cameron tried to persuade German Chancellor Angela Merkel to to let the UK have a special deal to opt out of free movement of people while staying in the single market. She said no, and she meant, well, no, not no, but ok, if you push hard enough, maybe yes, just no. When she said it again before the referendum vote, she meant no. And last week to Theresa May in Brussels, again the answer was no. She's not quite sure how to make it any clearer, but in the uk, politicians and journalists are still asking the question, what does Merkel really think? The chatter in Westminster is all about how Britain can persuade Germany to give it the best bits of the single market. And amid all the talk of red lines and not revealing your hand, there is continued speculation about how to interpret the signals coming out of Berlin. In fact, it's all quite simple. Merkel means what she says and. And German politicians are getting increasingly frustrated by London not seeming to understand this. For many in Berlin, you're either in the single market with all the obligations and privileges that come with that, or you're not. And people here don't understand why Britain doesn't just say which of those two options it wants. But to a certain extent, the confusion is quite understandable. Germany and Britain don't only have different ways of communicating, but also completely different political cultures. In the rough and tumble world of confrontational British politics, we're all used to hearing things which sound like one thing but mean another. Politics needs to be exciting in the UK to keep journalists and voters interested. So rhetorical bluster and the odd showy overblown promise with a bit of backtracking later is often forgiven, especially if you've managed a witty gag or two along the way. In Germany, where the tradition of consensual coalition building means means cooperation and compromise are more highly valued than macho posturing, not saying what you mean is not forgiven. It's seen as dishonest, confused and ineffective. The style of German political debate would send most British voters to sleep, whereas to German sensibilities, the British debate looks bafflingly inconsistent. In fact, that's the word that explains the whole point. You hear the German word consigfent, which roughly translates as consistent a lot here. And. And it's a highly prized virtue. It means you'll do what you say and live by the consequences if you don't. Some might say we haven't seen much evidence of that in British politics recently. Now, that's all fine when those differing values and political styles remain in their respective countries, but right now we have two very different worlds misunderstanding each other. In Brussels, Brexit may mean Brexit in Westminster. But Theresa May would be well advised to remember that in Germany, no very definitely means no. And if she does get offered a biscuit from Angela Merkel in any upcoming negotiations, she might do well to take it. The plate probably won't come round again.
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Damian McGuinness in Berlin nearly a year ago, three suicide bombers blew themselves up at the Stud de France in the north of Paris, beginning the deadliest attack in France since World War II. Other gunmen then attacked the Bataclan Theatre and nearby cafes and restaurants. By the end of the evening, 130 people had been killed and over 350 injured. Seven of the terrorists of Islamic State were also dead. Jake Wallace Simons was one of the journalists who flew out to Paris to cover the aftermath, and he's recently been
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back in the soft autumn sunshine, La Belle Equipe Cafe could hardly have looked more cheerful or more alive. At the tables outside, two young women were sipping coffee and sharing secrets while an old man was smoking rolled up cigarettes and watching the street. Inside, a man was huddled contentedly over his laptop. Behind the bar, a giggling waitress was balancing the top of a pineapple on a colleague's head. I stood on the pavement for a moment. A year had passed since I was last here and I knew I had to come back. I just didn't know what to do. Now I noticed that some bicycles were propped against the railings outside. There had been bicycles in the same place last year, only they had been barely visible beneath all the flowers and tributes and their owners had never returned. In my mind's eye I could still see the carpet of candles that had appeared outside the cafe after the killings and which gradually spread into the street. I could see the messages of grief that had been pasted to the single tree outside. I could see the bullet holes in the window. Through one of them someone had threaded a white rose. And now the sun was shining and 1940s jazz was floating from the cafe into the street, and people were drinking coffee and chatting at the very tables where people had died. The first time I saw La Belle Equipe Cafe was early in the morning after the Attacks. The city was still on lockdown and I'd come straight from the airport. Most journalists headed for the Bataclan Theatre, but I'd been sent here, where 19 people had been killed and nine left in critical condition. I spent the next two weeks outside the cafe, getting to know the community, speaking to witnesses and survivors, and gradually piecing together the events of that night. The first person I'd met was Karim, a 38 year old local man who had rushed to help after the gunman left. He told me how he'd cared for a badly injured woman, repeating, sava, Sava, don't be afraid. Don't go to sleep. Romain, a waiter, described how he had helped drag the wounded to safety in his restaurant a few doors down and tended to them as they lay on the tables. Later, he had helped the emergency services line up the bodies in a cobbled side street. He told me details I'd prefer not to recall. Sebastian, a theater director who also ran to help the injured, told me how he had come face to face with the killers as they left for the next next target. He could never forgive himself for not trying to stop them, he said, even though that would have been suicide. A group of colleagues from the nearby Cafe des Anges, Cafe of Angels, had been celebrating a birthday that night at La Belle Equipe. Eleven of them had been killed. One in particular, Ludwig Bombas, threw himself in front of his friend Chloe and was shot dead. Chloe was hit in the arm but survived. She was taken to hospital, repeating Ludwig's name over and over again. At first, simply covering the story was so demanding that there was no room for emotion. But later, when the tempo slowed, there were moments when it hit you before flying home. I remember I went back to Le Belly Keep to light a candle that I'd bought at a nearby church. It was the first time I'd had a chance to behave simply as a human being. And that was the only time I broke down. There can be little doubt that the Paris attacks changed Europe. I went on to cover the terror in Brussels and in Nice, and each time it was horrific. But in terms of its scale and brutality, Paris seemed to mark the beginning of something dark and new. Now here I stood a year on in the sunshine, seeing no trace of the horrors that had gripped the City of Light just a year before. The pain was still here, but Paris was defiant. And so, after a few minutes, I gathered my thoughts, took a breath and entered the cafe as a customer.
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Jake Wallace Simons. The Ethiopian government imposed a nationwide state of emergency earlier this month and says it has arrested more than 1600 people. This came after a series of large protests over the last year, particularly in the Oromia region, and there are now worries that the sliding towards chaos and ethnic conflict James Jeffrey, living in the bubble that is the capital Addis Ababa, says he struggles between trying to make sense of what's going on and succumbing to the urge to have a good time while he can.
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I had a dream in which I was trapped in a room with a group of people who proceeded to set it on fire. For now, fortunately, Ethiopia is not in flames. The state of emergency and its associated powers, including increased use of federal security forces to quell unrest, imposing curfews, arbitrary arrests and more besides, seem to be having the desired effect. The beginning of October saw millions of dollars worth of damage done to foreign factories around the country, torched by bands of young men. The military units deployed to stop them appear to have put a lid on that sort of wanton destruction, at least for the time being. But news filtering in from the hinterlands sounds deeply troubling while remaining stubbornly hard to pin down. There's talk of Christians and Muslims clashing and killing each other deep in the southeast, of people scrutinizing travellers faces for traditional scarification that indicates ethnicity and food supplies to Addis Ababa dwindling as Oromo farmers boycott the city. Meanwhile, everyone, Ethiopian and foreigner alike, is being driven potty by continuing Internet blackouts and left gazing forlornly at their smartphones. Twitter and Facebook are permanently blocked. There is context to this. Social media have pulsated with wildly bogus and incendiary claims, many of them veiled or not so veiled ethnic barbs. That's a danger in a country as diverse as Ethiopia, in which the main ethnic groups all harbour historical grievances against each other. The media will kill this country. They really will destroy it, was the assessment by one Ethiopian of social media and diaspora, satellite television channels broadcast from the US and hell bent against the current regime. In spite of all this, the tragedy, the rage and the intrigue in Addis Ababa, the music coming from the raucous diversity in the Piazza Old Quarter sounds even more invigorating. A sense of abandonment seems to accompany life here as a foreign freelance journalist now driven by a subconscious need to seize each day in case things really do fall apart or the government decides to boot us out. But the greatest journalistic challenge I'm encountering isn't the government. It's the lack of interest from Western editors I suspect Ethiopia's situation appears too opaque to generate juicy headlines or thousands of Internet hits. At least my dating life, normally utterly moribund, seems to have perked up with the state of emergency, although one evening in the piazza left a bitter taste. My date was a delight, all fine boned features, coal rimmed eyes and mean dance moves. But as we were busy maintaining the stereotype of a clumsy foreigner with an Ethiopian beauty in tow, a few bars away, a fight broke out with one man beaten to death. A friend of mine passed the bar just afterwards and saw its floor covered in blood and broken glass. Apparently the fight had been pre arranged and the young man killed for throwing his weight around was a Tigrayan from the same ethnic group, vilified by protesters for dominating Ethiopia's ruling party. But by the following weekend, the rumour mill had moved on. He wasn't Tigrayan, and it had all been over a woman. I've not been able to confirm anything, which is no surprise. When it comes to understanding Ethiopia, the onion analogy rules. There are always innumerable layers to strip away. Things seem to have calmed down, but it's very difficult to know what is going on in the country, one Ethiopian journalist commented before a recent press conference in the capital. Even after it ended, the consensus was that no one who attended was any the wiser. Perhaps this inscrutability is why the foreign policy approaches of the UK and US Ethiopia's two main foreign donors who might be expected to have some leverage over its ruling party remained so anaemic. History clearly shows how Ethiopia's two preceding regimes the imperial dynasty of Emperor Haile Selassie and the communist military junta of Mengistu Haile Mariam both crumbled after underestimating the Ethiopian people. The state of emergency indicates Ethiopia's ruling party isn't underestimating these latest protests. But I fear it is underestimating the critical mass of grievances, the resolve of those who feel wronged, and the urgent need for meaningful reforms. The outside world shouldn't take its eye off Ethiopia, lest it lurch toward even worse calamity. So I try to ignore my sparse inbox and keep pitching stories to Western editors. And I keep heading to the piazza while the good times last.
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James Jeffrey in Addis Ababa throughout the US Presidential election campaign, there's been plenty of talk about two Americas. The divisions aren't just about political allegiance. There are deep undercurrents of loyalty to other kinds of tribe regional, religious, racial and economic. Lindsay Johns has just been meeting some of the country's most privileged people, the students at Harvard University, before traveling well beyond the academic ivory towers to revisit Harlem, the traditional African American neighborhood of New York. But things weren't quite as he remembered them.
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Master the dichotomy don't let the dichotomy master you has long been one of my life's mantras, but it's easier said than done. For as long as I can remember, I've been straddling different worlds, caught between black and white, working class and middle class, educated and uneducated. And I found my latest trip to the east coast summed up this often lonely but ultimately liberating experience of attempting to reconcile places, cultures and mindsets which are often ideologically disparate or even mutually antagonistic. At Harvard to give a lecture on the South African novelist and freedom fighter Alex Laguma, I arrived to find a sunny yet febrile Cambridge. It's a predominantly white, wealthy setting replete with patrician New England grandeur, fragile academic egos and a frisson of acute racial angst. I both give and receive the nod, that automatic gesture of recognition and solidarity between black and brown folk in majority white spaces on US College campuses, that acknowledgement is a meaningful thing. The august statue of John Harvard stands in the university's yard, which is now bedecked with Black Lives Matter banners. Welcome to Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2016, as America undergoes perhaps its most intense period of racial introspection in decades. Welcome to Harvard, where generations of white privilege and new ranks of students radicalized by the Black Lives Matter movement are now uneasy bedfellows. The strident local Boston accent grates on my ears. Dulcet it is not. After a week of book launches and evening talks, I am yearning to hear some Ebonics, the sound of African American English, just for the sake of linguistic variety. A few days later, staying with exceedingly hospitable friends of friends in a salubrious cookie cutter suburb, I experienced for the first time the trappings of a millionaire lifestyle. Flying to Princeton for the day in their private plane, relishing my wholly surreal immersion in this hitherto foreign world. I just tried to be me. That's all one can ever do. When it's time to head to New York, I'm ready to come back down to earth and take the $20 Megabus. But the generous offer of another hop in the private plane unsurprisingly, wins. After landing at White Plains, I look back wistfully as the two seater takes off. Now, just like the Jamaican American author and poet Claude McKay some 80 years before me. I must head home to Harlem, where I have often stayed before on 137th Street. At last I'm finally back where I kind of belong. Boy, I've missed you. Harlem, 135th and Lenox, is my stop, baby. Uptown is where it's at. But wait, Uptown is not like I remember it anymore. Harlem, the spiritual heart of black America, is changing fast. Rampant gentrification, unfailingly signalled by white female joggers, is everywhere. The once ubiquitous neighbourhood characters, the true Harlemites who could have easily stepped out of a Langston Hughes poem, a Chester Himes novel or a James Baldwin play, are now harder to find than what I would consider a sane person of color at a Trump rally. The funkalicious melody of Isaac Hayes seminal Shaft soundtrack and the impassioned drawl of Bobby Womack's mellifluous Across 110th street, musical anthems rooted in urban degradation, righteous black anger and the perennial struggle for dignity, equality and human rights increasingly evoke the Harlem of yesteryear. Not today. Instead, artisanal French coffee shops, bars with expensive craft beers and insouciant hipsters with ironic facial hair are replacing the soul food shacks, bohemian jazz joints and raucous tenement blocks. The Harlem I knew and loved. Sick Transit, Gloria Mundi. And yet, as this light brown Englishman in New York walks down towards 125th Street, I am poignantly reminded that such is the nature of life. Change is the only constant during our brief time on Earth. And I do like nice coffee, just maybe not at $6 a cup. I will always love Harlem. It might be in danger of losing its totemic soul with a flood of money, proving the final killer blow to this much maligned, misunderstood and protean neighborhood. But it has once again afforded me a refuge. All my life I have, as Lord Byron famously said, stood among them, but not of them, always the ironic social commentator from the liminal fringes. So I think to myself, we still need to reach a place where the mental boxes of race, class and wealth don't outweigh our overarching and far more important, common humanity. Maybe the two worlds of Harvard and Harlem are not easily reconciled, but it's always worth a try.
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Lindsay Johns Our ancestors were intrepid travellers, sailing around the globe in search of new lands and frequently claiming them for the British crown. Many felt they were bringing civilization to these territories, but they often also introduced disease and alien species. Small islands have been particularly vulnerable. Chris Carnegie has recently been to a distant spot in the South Atlantic, where he met a man with murder on his mind. But doing his best to rebalance the odds in favour of indigenous wildlife.
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Keith Springer doesn't really do birthdays. That's just as well, because when he turned 55 a few weeks ago, he was on a forbidding lump of rock south of the roaring 40s. His handful of companions made him a cake and that was that. I wonder what sort of presents he normally receives. What do you get a guy who's one of the most prolific killers on Earth? Springer carries an air of steely determination. Home is near Christchurch, New Zealand, but he's done his contract killing in many places around the southern hemisphere. And now he's facing one of the biggest challenges of his life. The monster mice of Goth Island. We met on a polar research ship called the Agulhas. Six days out of Cape Town, it dropped me at the remote British island of Tristan da Cunha, where I do some volunteering for the local government. I saw Keith again on the return leg, by which time he'd sailed further south and landed on Tristan's sister island. You could fairly call Gough an outpost of an outpost. That ship carried an intoxicating mix of people. In one giant floating coincidence, I found an artist from Holland, an accountant from England, a priest from South Africa, a dentist from Scotland. On the parade went helicopter pilot, seal watcher, police officer, maintenance man, diplomat, ornithologist, all alongside islanders heading to or from their homes. Oh, and there was the exuberant Frenchman whose machinery sniffs the Atlantic air for traces of rogue nuclear tests. Now he does birthdays. All right. His party on board featured a cake in the shape of two plump buttocks. And in among them all, Keith Springer, world expert in the slaughter of small furry creatures. His tally of victims rats, rabbits, cats and mice, easily tops a million. He's on a mission to undo the havoc wrought by man on some of the Earth's most precious environments. And it's about to reach a climax. With the mice on Gough Islands and nature's test tubes self contained, their flora and fauna adapt rapidly and with beautiful precision to their exact circumstances. But when man blunders in, bringing invasive species as his fellow travellers, carnage ensues. So it is on Gough, home to the critically endangered Tristan albatross. It's thought seal hunting ships of the old days brought a handful of common house mice to the island. They multiplied and now run rampant with the eggs and chicks of millions of seabirds, providing their all you can eat buffet. And when they raid the nests of the albatross. They get a free pass. Neither chick nor parent has evolved to recognize the threat. They can watch uncomprehendingly as the young are eaten alive. There's a video that shows a mother albatross desperately nudging the lifeless corpse of her baby. Eventually she turns away with a feather in her beak, like someone with a lock of human hair as their final keepsake. It's easy to feel emotional about the plight of The Gough seabirds. 600,000 are being destroyed each year and the mouse invaders have already evolved to twice their normal size. The near total obliteration of an entire species of albatross is a real possibility. But Keith Springer sees it all through unemotional eyes. He's got a job to do on Gough. He sized up the accommodation blocks and the helicopter pad. He calculated locations for temporary buildings and poison bait dumps. He worked out how much food, how much fuel, how many people and how many aircraft he'll need working for the rspb. He's putting the operational detail into an audacious plan to overfly the island, spraying poison pellets that are fine tuned to kill the mice. But they must do it in harsh mid winter conditions while caging and protecting birds and trying to reach mice in cliff crevices. This is extreme conservation work and it won't come cheap. A campaign's underway to raise more than £7 million. If it hits target, the eradication should be complete in four years time. If it doesn't hit target, the mouse banquet rolls on unchecked. Keith Springer's spent much of his life holed up on remote islands, shivering in the cold and eating from ration stores. He's sacrificed normal family life to his mission. But he says he's gained something different. A life in places that he calls elemental. Breathtaking places where nature's beauty and nature's fury are laid bare. If his plan works, five years from now, there'll be a whole new generation of young albatrosses soaring over the vastness of the South Atlantic. They'll have survived to reach their first birthdays untroubled by alien attackers. Now that could be quite some party.
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Chris Carnegie with a serving of mouse on the menu. I'll be back on Saturday with more palatable morsels from our own correspondence. Do join us. Goodbye.